Six months after its launch, the Open Research and Contributor ID registry, which provides a central place for researchers to collate different aspects of their work at no cost, has attracted more than 120,000 users worldwide.
Through ORCID, researchers can tag their work with their unique 16-digit number, making it easily attributable and discoverable.
As more organisations integrate the system into their workflows, it is hoped that researchers will have less paperwork to do when submitting papers, or job or grant applications. Instead of listing the information usually required, such as past publications, they can input their ID to link to a ready-made database.
The not-for-profit registry has been growing steadily since its launch in October. The weekly sign-up figure has increased to between 6,000 and 7,000 in the past month, and executive director Laurel Haak says the ultimate goal is universal adoption.
ORCID already has the support of organisations such as the United States National Institutes of Health, Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group—which is giving researchers the option to add their IDs when submitting papers—and three US universities that are piloting the system.
The Wellcome Trust plans to incorporate it, on a voluntary basis, into its grant systems within the next couple of months, says Wellcome’s head of evaluation, Liz Allen, who is also an ORCID board member. She says: “With the rapid expansion of research-related outputs and information on the web, the longer we go on without trying to connect the pieces, the harder it will be to bring them together.”
Funders are expected to benefit from an ID system because they will be able to distinguish between researchers and use the unique IDs of award winners to better track the impact of the funding they have awarded.
Brian Kelly, a researcher at the University of Bath who has signed up to ORCID, acknowledges that getting more people interested will rely on good communication of the system’s privacy settings.
“There could be a knee-jerk reaction about using IDs, but there shouldn’t be—it’s up to me how I use my information,” he says. “If you publish a paper today it’s likely to be included in online searches [anyway].” Haak stresses that researchers have complete autonomy over what they attach to their profiles and have the option of unlinking it at any time.
For Kelly, the benefits far outweigh any concerns. “[This solves] problems with common surnames,” he says. “It also decouples the individual and their research organisation as it doesn’t depend on an institutional email address that will be invalid once they leave.”
Information technology charity Jisc also backs ORCID. Programme support officer Verena Weigert says it is “definitely something that needs to happen”. However, she adds that it will be necessary to build up a business case for the system to persuade other funders and universities to implement it.